January 2016 WordPress News – This Month in WordPress w/ CodeinWP

There’s surely some positive vibe going on in the WordPress community at the beginning of the year! We had new releases, nice improvements, relevant numbers, interesting survey results, a couple of curious changes, and some great articles that offer useful advice on various matters overall.

Welcome to the January 2016 edition of This Month in WordPress w/ CodeinWP – the first edition of 2016. This is our monthly roundup of news and stories from around the WordPress space.

January 2016 in WordPress

A new WooCommerce version is here. I’m talking about 2.5, called “Dashing Dolphin.” It is focused on providing a quicker e-commerce experience by making your store run more smoothly than before. Some other changes worth pointing out:

WooCommerce now tracks your website’s visitors and what they have in the cart.

A couple of back-end pages have been improved. The tax settings screen, for instance.

The layout of the email pages has been improved.

WP CLI support has been built in – the possibility to control your site via the command line.

It’s time for WPShout’s annual hosting review. It’s a survey that brings out opinions and real thoughts on the most popular WordPress hosting providers out there.

The survey investigates seven traits important for every web host: average satisfaction, value, reliability, speed, support, median site count, usability, and WordPress compatibility. There’s more than a hundred respondents (users who own a WordPress site).

The guys from WordPress.org realized how old many of the testimonials on the site got, and decided to renew the section. From now on, the testimonials page will be showing the latest opinions, thoughts, and statements from everyone who uses the #ilovewp hashtag on WordPress, Twitter, and Facebook. The individual messages will be selected by the WordPress team.

Do you have anything to say to/about WordPress? Share your best WordPress-related stories and don’t forget to add the hashtag.

This is a great report by Wordfence about the state of WordPress security. Wordfence interviewed 7,375 users about various security issues that they stumbled upon in 2015.

The results were put together into a nice infographic that’s divided into a number of sections. You’ll find great insights related to plugins, security attitudes, security concerns, and lots of other interesting facts and numbers.

From now on, you can use ad banners on your site through the new WordAds, which is Automattic’s version of Google AdWords. WordAds advertising network will be available through Jetpack and the new AdControl plugin.

I know routine kind of breaks down your motivation sometimes. But that’s where tools come into play! Interested in social media marketing? Here’s a list of great plugins that can help you with social media promotion.

Find out how and what it takes to transfer your files from your computer to your WordPress site and vice-versa. FTP might look difficult at first glance, but after starting to work with it, you’ll see that it’s not really a big deal.

That’s it for this edition. Anything we missed?

About The Author

Writer and WordPress blogger at ThemeIsle, CodeinWP, and Revive Social. Occasionally, I share content marketing tips on my personal blog. When I'm not creating content, I'm either on a mountain trail, at a metal concert, playing tennis, or reading.